The History of Alphabets Reading Answers

The history of alphabetic writing goes back to the consonantal writing system used for Semitic languages in the Levant in the 2nd millennium BCE. Most or closely all alphabetic scripts used throughout the world today eventually go back to this Semitic proto alphabet. Its primary origins can be outlined back to a Proto-Sinaitic script developed in Ancient Egypt to signify the language of Semitic-speaking workers and slaves in Egypt. This script was partially influenced by the older Egyptian hieratic, a cursive script connected to Egyptian hieroglyphs. Mostly through Phoenician, Hebrew and later Aramaic, three closely associated members of the Semitic family of scripts that were in use throughout the early first millennium BCE, the Semitic alphabet became the ancestor of multiple writing systems across the Middle East, Europe, northern Africa and South Asia. Some modern authors differentiate between consonantal scripts of the Semitic type, called "abjads" since 1996, and "true alphabets" in the narrow sense, the distinguishing condition being that true alphabets constantly allocate letters to both consonants and vowels on an equal basis, while the symbols in a pure abjad stand only for consonants. (So-called impure abjads may use diacritics or a few symbols to represent vowels.)

In this sense, then the first true alphabet would be the Greek alphabet, which was adapted from the Phoenician alphabet, but not all scholars and linguists think this is enough to strip away the original meaning of an alphabet to one with both vowels and consonants. Latin, the most extensively used alphabet today, in turn originates from the Etruscan and Greek alphabets, themselves derived from Phoenician.

Two scripts are well attested from before the end of the fourth millennium BCE: Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Hieroglyphs were employed in three ways in Ancient Egyptian texts: as logograms (ideograms) that signify a word signifying an object pictorially shown by the hieroglyph; more commonly as phonograms writing a sound or sequence of sounds; and as determinatives (which provide clues to meaning without directly writing sounds). Since vowels were mostly unwritten, the hieroglyphs which specified a single consonant could have been used as a consonantal alphabet (or "abjad"). This was not done when writing the Egyptian language but seems to have been a noteworthy influence on the formation of the first

alphabet (used to write a Semitic language). All subsequent alphabets around the world have either descended from this first Semitic alphabet, or have been stimulated by one of its descendants (i.e. "stimulus diffusion"), with the possible exception of the Meroitic alphabet, a 3rd-century BCE adaptation of hieroglyphs in Nubia to the south of Egypt. The Rongorongo script of Easter Island may also be an independently invented alphabet, but too little is known of it to be certain.

By at least the 8th century BCE the Greeks borrowed the Phoenician alphabet and adapted it to their own language, making in the process the first "true" alphabet, in which vowels were given equal status with consonants. According to Greek legends conveyed by Herodotus, the alphabet was brought from Phoenicia to Greece by Cadmos. The letters of the Greek alphabet are the same as those of the Phoenician alphabet, and both alphabets are arranged in the same order. Though, whereas separate letters for vowels would have essentially stalled the legibility of Egyptian, Phoenician, or Hebrew, their absence was problematic for Greek, where vowels played a much more significant role. The Greeks used for vowels some of the

Phoenician letters representing consonants which weren't used in Greek speech. All the names of the letters of the Phoenician alphabet started with consonants, and these consonants were what the letters represented, something called the acrophonic principle. However, numerous Phoenician consonants were absent in Greek, and thus several letter names came to be pronounced with initial vowels. 

Since the start of the name of a letter was likely to be the sound of the letter (the acrophonic principle), in Greek these letters came to be used for vowels. For example, the Greeks had no glottal stop or voiced pharyngeal sounds, so the Phoenician letters 'aleph and 'ayin became Greek alpha and o (later renamed

o micron) and stood for the vowels /a/ and /o/ rather than the consonants. As this blessed development only provided for five or six (depending on dialect) of the twelve Greek vowels, the Greeks ultimately created digraphs and other modifications, such as ei, ou, and o (which became omega), or in some cases simply ignored the deficiency, as in long a, i, u. Some varieties of the Greek alphabet developed. One, known as Western Greek or Chalcidian, was used west of Athens and in southern Italy. The other variation, known as Eastern Greek, was used in Asia Minor (also called Asian Greece i.e. present-day Turkey). The Athenians (c. 400 BCE) adopted that latter variation and finally the rest of the Greek-speaking world followed. After first writing right to left, the Greeks ultimately chose to write from left to right, unlike the Phoenicians who wrote from right to left. Many Greek letters are like Phoenician, except the letter direction is inverted or changed, which can be the result of historical changes from right-to-left writing to boustrophedon to left-to-right writing. 

Greek is in turn the foundation of all the modern scripts of Europe. The alphabet of the early western Greek dialects, where the letter eta remained an /h/, gave rise to the Old Italic alphabet which in turn developed into the Old Roman alphabet. In the eastern Greek dialects. which did not have an /h/, eta stood for a vowel, and remains a vowel in modern Greek and all other alphabets derived from the eastern variants: Glagolitic, Cyrillic, Armenian, Gothic (which used both Greek and Roman letters), and possibly Georgian. Although this description presents the progression of scripts in a linear fashion this is a simplification For example the Manchu alphabet sloned from the abiads of West Asia was also influenced by Korean hangul which was either independent (the traditional view) or derived from the abugidas of South Asia. 

Georgian deceptively derives from the Aramaic family hut was powerfully influenced in its conception by Greek. An altered version of the Greek alphabet, using an additional half dozen demotic hieroglyphs, was used to write Coptic Egyptian. Then there is Cree syllabics (an abugida), which is a combination of Devanagari and Pitman shorthand developed